1. Field of the Invention
The subject of the present invention is a motor vehicle side panel including at least one door mounted on a door frame.
2. Discussion of Background
In a conventional manner, motor vehicles include two side panels connected together by the substructure of the vehicle and the roof.
Each side panel comprises one or two doors and a door frame, made up of side uprights, two in the case where the panel includes only one door, three in the case where the panel includes two of them, of a part of the substructure of the vehicle, and of a part of the roof.
Each door is connected to two side uprights by at least two hinges on the first and by a lock on the second.
The door conventionally comes into planar flush contact against the frame, with no mechanical insertion between the door and the frame.
During collisions between two motor vehicles, side impact, after frontal impact which is the more widespread, is the one which causes the most serious injuries, capable even of leading to the death of the occupants of the vehicle.
In the event of a side impact, the vehicle struck is subjected to the force due to the impact generally in the region of the doors, in a zone whose mechanical strength in compression in the direction of the impact is generally low.
This generally gives rise to great deformations of the side panel of the vehicle and a significant reduction in the volume of the passenger compartment.
Indeed, since the doors are in simple planar flush contact with the door frame and are connected to the said frame on the one hand by the hinges and, on the other hand by the lock, the parts in contact slide over one another due to the door panel being pushed in and in this case, the door absorbs only a very small part of the energy transmitted during the impact, due to the fact that the thin sheet metal of the door works mainly in bending.
It is known to reinforce the doors and to limit the extent to which they are pushed in by using reinforcement bars, called side-impact bars in order to absorb more of the energy due to the impact in the region of the doors. In this case, the energy due to the impact is distributed linearly over the reinforcement bars and is thus transmitted into the two side uprights of the door at the points at which the bars bear on the uprights.
In this case, the energy due to the impact is converted into a bending force on the reinforcing bars, which, after deformation of the bars, gives rise also to a deformation in bending of the uprights.
Such a deformation of the door uprights is very damaging to the occupants, these generally being seated in line with these uprights.